Questions and reports related to Sierra Nevada current and forecast conditions, as well as general precautions and safety information. Trail conditions, fire/smoke reports, mosquito reports, weather and snow conditions, stream crossing information, and more.

For a fairly good look at current conditions in the Sierra, take a look at Google Earth. The date of the current Google Earth imagery is March 2015. Pretty recent. A lot of stuff is already snow free. And the snow pack is frighteningly sparse. Have a look.

EDIT: Funny, I went back and the dates suddenly changes to 2014, May. Maybe I just got a sneak peek and they pulled it. I could see that it was different than the 2015 I was looking at.

in Google Earth to trust the imagery date, you select View, then Historical Imagery, and it'll pop up a timeline view that you can step backwards in time with. (see red oval below; that's what pops up)

For example, Evelyn Lake, Tuolumne County (search)

Select as I said above, and you get the tool bar in the upper left.

It was frozen in 3/2015.

it was clear in 9/2013. same in 9/2012.

in 5/2012, looks like it was breaking up.

I use the Historical stuff to see the lay of the land w/o snow.

Remember that Google Earth is not realtime. They decide when their satellites take the pics. Street View is a different punch out app, so i don't even think Historical imagery applies to that.

An example of the page:

Capture.JPG

Russ

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I just wanted to second Paul's comment. Google uses a variety of sources for their satellite imagery so depending upon the location, there will be different dates (and quality) available. There must be some way to see recent satellite imagery to check snow coverage. Does anyone know where to find it?

OK, that was kinda long. Click on the area of interest and use the zoom tool. It looks like you can walk up the Toulumne river canyon all the way up to the head of Lyle Canyon without hitting any snow. (I may have mis-spelled something, but I can't tell because as I write this, it is under the emoticons.)